Back on the topic, a Buffalo router is what you want. There are several models, but bang for the buck, they're faster, bigger, more RAM, and they work awesome.
For some reason, they don't sell them at the local Best Buy, but online purchases aren't a big deal. I bought mine about 6 months ago for $50, it was an excellent purchase and even came with its own build of DDWRT as an optional install! (took about 20 minutes)
We are using SSDs in production on our database servers. The speed improvement is more than dramatic - better than 10x improvement on basically every test and simulation we could throw at 'em!
After a conservative rollout and a few painful hiccups, we've stabilized good results with simple RAID1, using the SSDs for the PostgreSQL partition. (/var/lib/pgsql) on CentOS servers.
They do have a significantly worse failure rate, but the combination of RAID 1, hot swap drive bays and an otherwise excellent hourly backup strategy result in both excellent uptimes and performance. At today's prices, if the average life expectancy of an SSD drive is just 6 months, we'd more than make up for this expense just with the DB servers we don't need to buy.
For production databases, steer clear of "consumer" drives, they last months before giving you thorny problems. Instead, spend a bit more and get either Intel 710 SSDs or if maximum performance is really REALLY important, the RealSSD P300.
I don't mind giving money to a company that's gone to the trouble of making a pleasant place for me to go and find an enjoyable book to read. They have comfortable lounge chairs that I can sit in for a while and read whatever I like. They serve decent coffee that I can enjoy while I read my book. They have a good selection of books, and my nook account shares seamlessly between my 1st gen Nook and my Verizon Droid2 phone.
Because of the local store, I would very much rather give them my money than Amazon or any other "pure online" retailer.
But now they are fighting patent trolling? Oh yeah!
There is more than one way to skin a cat - a sad truth for cats the world over. Postgres combined with commodity hardware and database joining extensions like dblink allow you to partition data across dozens (or hundreds) of commodity servers, allowing you to provide massively parallel access to massively large datasets without compromising performance. The cost is developer competence.
The trick is to have a decent abstraction layer and technologies that commoditize cross-database querying, something my company has spent considerable time developing, with rather striking success.
Postgres is an amazingly capable software system and its performance in the Enterprise space is really only limited by the quality of the developers using it. The difference between Postgres and Oracle seems to be on focus: Oracle seems to seek limits to the damage caused by idiot developers, while Postgres (seems to) seek to maximize the capabilities of competent developers. It's an exercise to you to decide which approach is more productive in the long haul.
I have a 10-ish Mbit "home basic" Comcast Internet. We routinely have 2-6 people streaming HD/720p Hulu concurrently, Magic Jack, gaming, etc with very few issues. (Watching Bones at the moment)
You know what I find really interesting about this story? BlackBerry is trying to save their hide by moving their telephone O/S to a Unix variant. Now that iOS and Android are both Unix-derived, it's old hat, almost a given. But it was just a few years ago that it was understood that Unix was old, antiquated technology to be replaced by newer, sexier Windows/Mac systems.
What a difference a decade makes! Linux has since come to dominate the server and engineering workstation spaces, MacOS has been reborn as a child of Unix, and just about everything from your router to your microwave to your cell phone run some variation of Unix.
True this! I'm 39 and that's enough time to see how the effects of age impact. I know a woman who is perhaps 5 years older than me. When she was 25, she was HOT but pursued a life of drugs (including meth) and now looks like she's in her 60s.
Taking CARE of yourself goes a LONG WAY in adding "good" years to your life. Doing the following will add anywhere from 10 to 30 "good" years assuming otherwise normal life expectancy:
1) Minimizing fast carbs 2) Modest alcohol 3) Avoid hard drugs 4) Eat lots of greens and fresh vegetables 5) Keep weight under control 6) Get lots of cardio exercise 7) Moderate sun exposure
15 years ago, the full power now available in my phone required the better part of a 15-amp circuit to enable. Now, I get several hours of battery life from a device smaller than my wallet at this computational scale.
It may be true that battery life would suffer badly *today* trying to deliver an HD movie on my phone. Give it another generation or two and this will be commonplace.
See, there's this guy named Moore, and he made an observation decades ago that we now call Moore's law...
It's entirely true that the contacts you make in college last a lifetime. It's also just as true that the college experience is unnecessarily costly. Basic Chemistry hasn't changed significantly in 50 years, yet textbooks still cost well over $100. Similar for basic Math, Science, and even many Literature texts.
It would cost society a pittance to create open-sourced versions of these books without copyright encumbrances, but colleges are reluctant to step aboard for two reasons:
1) Arrogance: if it's free, it's not worth anything, right?
2) Self Interest: many professors are the authors of the textbooks they require. College bookstores run at a tidy profit that cash-starved universities crave.
In either event, the college system should focus on the customer - the students - and work to deliver the best value to its clientele.
We use SSDs in our CentOS Postgresql database servers, the OCZ Vertex 3. The difference has been jaw-dropping. The SSD drives, used as the partition the DB servers mount on, so thoroughly stomp 15K SCSI drives that the performance ratio is something like 10:1. Server loads drop from 3 to 0.3, and everybody notices the speed.
I put them into production over the summer, just for safety's sake I'll replace them over Christmas and keep the original set handy for emergencies.
Oh, and we back up all our databases every hour and always have, keeping the hourlies for 24 hour. If we should have an incident, recovery should be quick with minimal loss. (knock on wood)
Another article read up (on being Turing complete) that makes me appreciate just how much Turing has contributed to information theory.
In the modern age, Turing is perhaps one of the most under-appreciated bad assed geniuses around. I sorely and sincerely wish that his being homosexual didn't lead to his demise, mankind would be sooooo much better off had he lived a full life!
Wait.... people buy units that are only a GPS? That's absurd! Why would you buy a dedicated GPS when you can get an Android unit that's not only a GPS, but a telephone, a clock, text message client, email client, Web browser, Internet access point, dictaphone, camera, scanner, flashlight, radio, MP3 player, aircraft location scanner, video game console, flight simulator, and all the other things that a smart phone is, all in one?
As the CEO of EBay after it hit its "upward spiral", Meg proved to be a mediocre executive. She managed to broker one of the largest deals in history, the purchase of Skype, without managing to buy the source and lost her company tons of dollars. Having been handed one of the sweetest hands in executive history, she managed to not actually bankrupt the company.
She managed to spend STUPID amount of her personal money trying to become governor of California, only to fail miserably. I voted against her, and I give her a vote of no confidence.
I smoke, not at all. And I've been hearing about the "theoretical limitations" for a good 20 years now. Yes, the 386 processor was once touted as the last Moore's law processor.
As I sit here, typing this on my Fedora 15 laptop, I have a Mac mini playing some Law n Order type show off Hulu. I really WANT to like Apple, the company that made a Unix O/S that appeals to the masses. But sadly, I just can't.
With all the edicts about telling developers what they can and can't do on iPhones, (no flash) to only including ANCIENT copies of GNU utilities on MacOS, I smell loss of choice any time I give money to Apple. I was about to buy a Macbook Pro when Apple came out with their "no flash" edict... I bought a Dell Precision quad-core i7 that dual-boots Fedora/Windows instead.
So my phone is a Droid2, my laptop is a Dell running FC 15 instead of a MacBook.
Parent poster gets it right. As somebody who suffered a two thousand dollar utility bill when my daughter's friend cut the A/C down to 62 degrees just before we left for a week, (Yes, $2,000, one week) everything he says is correct. At my house we stay just shy of the highest energy track during the summer months, so ANY MISTAKES AT ALL can be very costly. Average bill is around $400.
But in all truth, I wouldn't change a thing. It helps us stay green, and keeps us on the cutting edge of new technologies. Over the past 30 years, energy use nationwide has skyrocketed, while California's use per capita has been flat, even as California's GDP growth vs National has remained comparable.
Strangely, the US Government has a pretty good track record for municipal services.
Guess you forgot to consider things like schools, roads, power, (which are usually at least a government regulated monopoly) water, law enforcement, fire protection, justice, and a myriad of other services that are generally run so well that most people don't give them a second thought.
You don't specify whether or not your friend would be working out of a colo. If so, space will be at a premium.
My needs are high reliability, low cost, and high density. (colo)
I've been providing an excellent bang/buck ratio using whitebox 1U rackmounts made by SuperMicro. For about $1,000 I can get a late model CPU with a decent amount of quality ECC RAM, dual Gbit Ethernet ports, SCSI / SATA3 interfaces with a chipset highly compatible with CentOS Linux. (my distro of choice)
This is server-grade equipment, optimized for I/O throughput and reliability over raw processing power. You may be looking for raw computational power with a higher tolerance of downtime, in which case you'd want to try something else.
Parameterized queries require pre-registration with the database engine, and have a host of other gotchas. EG: No dynamically created SQL queries.
Remembering to escape every variable also has it's own gotchas, including the inevitable security hole when you mistook public data as trusted source data.
So we rolled our own variation of parameterized queries, that includes references to the table/field in question so that type analysis can be done on input prior to parsing the query statement. It's highly effective, and reads like SQL, while being highly effective at stopping injection attacks cold.
The simple idea is that they query and the input are maintained separately all the way down to the DB abstraction layer. You *never* create the actual query outside the DB abstraction layer!
I wonder why this type of approach isn't more common?
Remember when we all thought that the mainframe was history? (They are entrenched in corporate America, and have experienced a strong resurgence as they do what they do extremely well.)
Remember when we all thought that Unix was going to disappear? (Where do we begin? Android/IOS, MacOSX, Wireless routers, cheap Linux servers everywhere not to mention Linux workstations, Unix/Linux variants easily outsell Windows variants today)
Windows won't disappear any time soon, any more than *nix and mainframes will. Both are rubust and well suited to their "home turf" and Microsoft would have to perform a long series of stupid things before they could kill their long-entrenched legacy. Instead, we'll see new marketplaces built upon the framework of existing infrastructure, and right now, javascript has rapidly become an emergent phenomenon - there's a new paradigm forming before our eyes as it goes from a little toy to a serious application development environment.
Will we talk about Prototype or JQuery in a few years like we now talk about Windows?
Slashdot Mirror
Back on the topic, a Buffalo router is what you want. There are several models, but bang for the buck, they're faster, bigger, more RAM, and they work awesome.
For some reason, they don't sell them at the local Best Buy, but online purchases aren't a big deal. I bought mine about 6 months ago for $50, it was an excellent purchase and even came with its own build of DDWRT as an optional install! (took about 20 minutes)
OpenVPN works great now!
We are using SSDs in production on our database servers. The speed improvement is more than dramatic - better than 10x improvement on basically every test and simulation we could throw at 'em!
After a conservative rollout and a few painful hiccups, we've stabilized good results with simple RAID1, using the SSDs for the PostgreSQL partition. (/var/lib/pgsql) on CentOS servers.
They do have a significantly worse failure rate, but the combination of RAID 1, hot swap drive bays and an otherwise excellent hourly backup strategy result in both excellent uptimes and performance. At today's prices, if the average life expectancy of an SSD drive is just 6 months, we'd more than make up for this expense just with the DB servers we don't need to buy.
For production databases, steer clear of "consumer" drives, they last months before giving you thorny problems. Instead, spend a bit more and get either Intel 710 SSDs or if maximum performance is really REALLY important, the RealSSD P300.
If the richest 1% of Americans paid the same tax rates as the middle class, there would be no government budget deficit.
I don't mind giving money to a company that's gone to the trouble of making a pleasant place for me to go and find an enjoyable book to read. They have comfortable lounge chairs that I can sit in for a while and read whatever I like. They serve decent coffee that I can enjoy while I read my book. They have a good selection of books, and my nook account shares seamlessly between my 1st gen Nook and my Verizon Droid2 phone.
Because of the local store, I would very much rather give them my money than Amazon or any other "pure online" retailer.
But now they are fighting patent trolling? Oh yeah!
There is more than one way to skin a cat - a sad truth for cats the world over. Postgres combined with commodity hardware and database joining extensions like dblink allow you to partition data across dozens (or hundreds) of commodity servers, allowing you to provide massively parallel access to massively large datasets without compromising performance. The cost is developer competence.
The trick is to have a decent abstraction layer and technologies that commoditize cross-database querying, something my company has spent considerable time developing, with rather striking success.
Postgres is an amazingly capable software system and its performance in the Enterprise space is really only limited by the quality of the developers using it. The difference between Postgres and Oracle seems to be on focus: Oracle seems to seek limits to the damage caused by idiot developers, while Postgres (seems to) seek to maximize the capabilities of competent developers. It's an exercise to you to decide which approach is more productive in the long haul.
PS: I'm in the PostgreSQL camp.
I have a 10-ish Mbit "home basic" Comcast Internet. We routinely have 2-6 people streaming HD/720p Hulu concurrently, Magic Jack, gaming, etc with very few issues. (Watching Bones at the moment)
You forgot to end your SMTP session properly.
.
You know what I find really interesting about this story? BlackBerry is trying to save their hide by moving their telephone O/S to a Unix variant. Now that iOS and Android are both Unix-derived, it's old hat, almost a given. But it was just a few years ago that it was understood that Unix was old, antiquated technology to be replaced by newer, sexier Windows/Mac systems.
What a difference a decade makes! Linux has since come to dominate the server and engineering workstation spaces, MacOS has been reborn as a child of Unix, and just about everything from your router to your microwave to your cell phone run some variation of Unix.
Wow!
True this! I'm 39 and that's enough time to see how the effects of age impact. I know a woman who is perhaps 5 years older than me. When she was 25, she was HOT but pursued a life of drugs (including meth) and now looks like she's in her 60s.
Taking CARE of yourself goes a LONG WAY in adding "good" years to your life. Doing the following will add anywhere from 10 to 30 "good" years assuming otherwise normal life expectancy:
1) Minimizing fast carbs
2) Modest alcohol
3) Avoid hard drugs
4) Eat lots of greens and fresh vegetables
5) Keep weight under control
6) Get lots of cardio exercise
7) Moderate sun exposure
Why don't they just speak normal English in the UK?
15 years ago, the full power now available in my phone required the better part of a 15-amp circuit to enable. Now, I get several hours of battery life from a device smaller than my wallet at this computational scale.
It may be true that battery life would suffer badly *today* trying to deliver an HD movie on my phone. Give it another generation or two and this will be commonplace.
See, there's this guy named Moore, and he made an observation decades ago that we now call Moore's law...
It's entirely true that the contacts you make in college last a lifetime. It's also just as true that the college experience is unnecessarily costly. Basic Chemistry hasn't changed significantly in 50 years, yet textbooks still cost well over $100. Similar for basic Math, Science, and even many Literature texts.
It would cost society a pittance to create open-sourced versions of these books without copyright encumbrances, but colleges are reluctant to step aboard for two reasons:
1) Arrogance: if it's free, it's not worth anything, right?
2) Self Interest: many professors are the authors of the textbooks they require. College bookstores run at a tidy profit that cash-starved universities crave.
In either event, the college system should focus on the customer - the students - and work to deliver the best value to its clientele.
Haven't you noticed? Microsoft is now officially a patent troll, making far more profits trolling Android than their own Windows mobile O/S.
We use SSDs in our CentOS Postgresql database servers, the OCZ Vertex 3. The difference has been jaw-dropping. The SSD drives, used as the partition the DB servers mount on, so thoroughly stomp 15K SCSI drives that the performance ratio is something like 10:1. Server loads drop from 3 to 0.3, and everybody notices the speed.
I put them into production over the summer, just for safety's sake I'll replace them over Christmas and keep the original set handy for emergencies.
Oh, and we back up all our databases every hour and always have, keeping the hourlies for 24 hour. If we should have an incident, recovery should be quick with minimal loss. (knock on wood)
Another article read up (on being Turing complete) that makes me appreciate just how much Turing has contributed to information theory.
In the modern age, Turing is perhaps one of the most under-appreciated bad assed geniuses around. I sorely and sincerely wish that his being homosexual didn't lead to his demise, mankind would be sooooo much better off had he lived a full life!
Wait.... people buy units that are only a GPS? That's absurd! Why would you buy a dedicated GPS when you can get an Android unit that's not only a GPS, but a telephone, a clock, text message client, email client, Web browser, Internet access point, dictaphone, camera, scanner, flashlight, radio, MP3 player, aircraft location scanner, video game console, flight simulator, and all the other things that a smart phone is, all in one?
As the CEO of EBay after it hit its "upward spiral", Meg proved to be a mediocre executive. She managed to broker one of the largest deals in history, the purchase of Skype, without managing to buy the source and lost her company tons of dollars. Having been handed one of the sweetest hands in executive history, she managed to not actually bankrupt the company.
She managed to spend STUPID amount of her personal money trying to become governor of California, only to fail miserably. I voted against her, and I give her a vote of no confidence.
I smoke, not at all. And I've been hearing about the "theoretical limitations" for a good 20 years now. Yes, the 386 processor was once touted as the last Moore's law processor.
As I sit here, typing this on my Fedora 15 laptop, I have a Mac mini playing some Law n Order type show off Hulu. I really WANT to like Apple, the company that made a Unix O/S that appeals to the masses. But sadly, I just can't.
With all the edicts about telling developers what they can and can't do on iPhones, (no flash) to only including ANCIENT copies of GNU utilities on MacOS, I smell loss of choice any time I give money to Apple. I was about to buy a Macbook Pro when Apple came out with their "no flash" edict... I bought a Dell Precision quad-core i7 that dual-boots Fedora/Windows instead.
So my phone is a Droid2, my laptop is a Dell running FC 15 instead of a MacBook.
Parent poster gets it right. As somebody who suffered a two thousand dollar utility bill when my daughter's friend cut the A/C down to 62 degrees just before we left for a week, (Yes, $2,000, one week) everything he says is correct. At my house we stay just shy of the highest energy track during the summer months, so ANY MISTAKES AT ALL can be very costly. Average bill is around $400.
But in all truth, I wouldn't change a thing. It helps us stay green, and keeps us on the cutting edge of new technologies. Over the past 30 years, energy use nationwide has skyrocketed, while California's use per capita has been flat, even as California's GDP growth vs National has remained comparable.
Plus, I like all the bike trails.
Strangely, the US Government has a pretty good track record for municipal services.
Guess you forgot to consider things like schools, roads, power, (which are usually at least a government regulated monopoly) water, law enforcement, fire protection, justice, and a myriad of other services that are generally run so well that most people don't give them a second thought.
Yourself included, it seems.
You don't specify whether or not your friend would be working out of a colo. If so, space will be at a premium.
My needs are high reliability, low cost, and high density. (colo)
I've been providing an excellent bang/buck ratio using whitebox 1U rackmounts made by SuperMicro. For about $1,000 I can get a late model CPU with a decent amount of quality ECC RAM, dual Gbit Ethernet ports, SCSI / SATA3 interfaces with a chipset highly compatible with CentOS Linux. (my distro of choice)
This is server-grade equipment, optimized for I/O throughput and reliability over raw processing power. You may be looking for raw computational power with a higher tolerance of downtime, in which case you'd want to try something else.
We already trust DNS to decide who can say where something is, why not include the ability to declare that you made it to the right place?
Parameterized queries require pre-registration with the database engine, and have a host of other gotchas. EG: No dynamically created SQL queries.
Remembering to escape every variable also has it's own gotchas, including the inevitable security hole when you mistook public data as trusted source data.
So we rolled our own variation of parameterized queries, that includes references to the table/field in question so that type analysis can be done on input prior to parsing the query statement. It's highly effective, and reads like SQL, while being highly effective at stopping injection attacks cold.
The simple idea is that they query and the input are maintained separately all the way down to the DB abstraction layer. You *never* create the actual query outside the DB abstraction layer!
I wonder why this type of approach isn't more common?
Remember when we all thought that the mainframe was history? (They are entrenched in corporate America, and have experienced a strong resurgence as they do what they do extremely well.)
Remember when we all thought that Unix was going to disappear? (Where do we begin? Android/IOS, MacOSX, Wireless routers, cheap Linux servers everywhere not to mention Linux workstations, Unix/Linux variants easily outsell Windows variants today)
Windows won't disappear any time soon, any more than *nix and mainframes will. Both are rubust and well suited to their "home turf" and Microsoft would have to perform a long series of stupid things before they could kill their long-entrenched legacy. Instead, we'll see new marketplaces built upon the framework of existing infrastructure, and right now, javascript has rapidly become an emergent phenomenon - there's a new paradigm forming before our eyes as it goes from a little toy to a serious application development environment.
Will we talk about Prototype or JQuery in a few years like we now talk about Windows?